After about three days of gathering and boiling the sap, came the "syruping down." During all that afternoon we added no more sap, and we watched carefully the tawny steaming mass in the kettle; and when it threatened to boil over we threw in a thin slice of fat pork which seemed to have some mysterious, calming influence. The odor grew more and more delicious, and finally the syrup was pronounced sufficiently thick. The kettle was swung off the logs and the syrup dripped through a cloth strainer into the carrying pail. Oh! the blackness of the material left on that strainer! but it was "clean woods-dirt" and never destroyed our faith in the maple sugar any more than did the belief that our friends were made of "dirt" destroy our friendship for them. Now the old stave bucket and the sumac spile are gone, and in their place a patent galvanized spile not only conducts the sap but holds in place a tin bucket carefully covered. The old caldron kettle is broken or lies rusting in the shed. In its place are evaporating vats placed over furnaces with chimneys, built in the new-fangled sugar houses. The maple molasses of to-day seems to us a pale and anæmic liquid and lacks just that delicious flavor of the rich, dark nectar which we, with the help of cinders and smoke and various other things, brewed of yore in the open woods. While sugar-making interests us chiefly as one of our own industries, yet we must not forget that it is based upon the life processes of the maple tree, and in studying about it we may be able to learn important facts about the tree which we have chosen for our study. QUESTIONS ON THE MAPLE TREE. 1. How does the maple tree look in winter? Describe it or sketch it. 2. Are the buds on the twigs opposite or alternate? 3. Are the tips of the twigs the same color as the bark on the larger limbs and trunk? 4. If you can draw, make a pencil sketch, natural size, of three inches square of bark of the maple tree trunk. 5. How does the bark on the trunk differ from that on the branches? 6. How does the bark on the trunk of a maple tree differ from that on the trunk of a soft maple or an elm? 7. What work for the tree do the trunk and branches perform? 8. Is the tree tapped on all sides? If not, why? 9. How deep must the spiles be driven successfully to draw off the sap? 10. Would you tap a tree directly above or at the same spot tapped last year; or would you place two spiles one above the other? Give reasons. 11. Why does the sap flow more freely on warm days after cold nights? 12. Is the sap of which we make sugar going up or down? 13. How does the sugar come to be in the sap? 14. Why is the sugar made during the "first run" better than that which is made later? Why cannot you make sugar in the summer? 15. Does it injure trees to tap them? 16. Do the holes made in earlier years become farther apart as the tree grows? 17. What other trees besides the sugar maple give sweet sap?